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Engagement & Impact

E&I Evidence

It's a good idea to continuously collate and record the evidence of your E&I activities, and the interactions from your various stakeholders with your project. Leaving an activity like this for long periods will make it difficult and time-consuming to go through emails, calendars, documents and social media mentions.

The evidence you collect of the E&I to your project may be divided into three categories

Dissemination: Letting people outside of academia know about your research findings. Refer to Communicating E&I for examples.

Relationships: Disseminating your research raises your profile, this potentially creates opportunities to engage with external stakeholders.  These new relationships are the link between your research and its eventual benefit, which makes it important to save all documentation demonstrating engagement for future reference.

Substantiation: Use the internet for tracking dissemination of your research and identifying who is using it and where. Citations of you, your research and/or your institution that provides evidence of the research impact can be identified through keyword-based web searches. Altmetrics and ORCiD can help with this. Site tools that capture unique visitors, downloads, page browsing and demographics can provide analysis and evidence of reach.

Some challenges to planning, collecting and managing research impact evidence: 

  • It can be difficult to characterise conceptual or capacity building impacts
  • Collecting evidence retrospectively is problematic
  • Important opportunities for collecting data may be missed, e.g. head count of visitors to an exhibition
  • Failure to recognise if your efforts are not working or leading to unintended consequences

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Adapted from Pontier, D. (2018). Five tips for collecting evidence for a divorce. Koenig Dunne. https://koenigdunne.com/five-tips-for-collecting-evidence-for-a-divorce/

Storing and organising your evidence

You will need to store and organise your evidence in some way so that it is readily accessible when needed. You may need the evidence for grant applications, promotions, job applications or reporting.

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